This is Trevor Young's original PR Warrior blog. The latest version can be found at www.prwarrior.com

February 25, 2013

Why Your Business Needs to Tell Stories

We live in a world where people—your customers—are at once intensely connected to one another, while at the same time putting up virtual shutters to ignore ads and sales messages.

This makes it difficult for cashed-up brands to cut through to be seen and heard by the crowd, let alone businesses that haven’t exactly got excess budget to throw around on marketing gimmicks.

This means you need to be smarter today if you are to slice through all the white noise. It means you need to become good at telling stories that resonate with people on a human level.

Why?

People love stories. It’s always been that way, going back years and years when we would sit around a campfire and listen to someone spin a yarn or two. And the tradition continues today. But instead of huddling around a campfire, we are hunching over our smartphone.

Telling Power Stories

Sydney-based journalist, author and startup entrepreneur, Valerie Khoo, conveys this brilliantly in her new book ‘Power Stories’. Valerie writes that power stories are the ones you tell to influence, inspire and persuade — which business wouldn’t want to do that?

She says everyone has the storytelling gene; it’s just that with some people it’s been suppressed and, like an unused muscle, needs to be exercised if it is to become stronger and more powerful.

Valerie’s book outlines the ‘eight stories you must tell to build an epic business’, and importantly, explains in plain English techniques you can use to turn yourself into a master storyteller.